**Before you read this, make sure you have read Parts 1 2 and 3

I guess in a way Edward Kraft’s victims knew that Kraft  wasn’t from around here. It wasn’t just the accent in his voice that gave it away, but the suit he wore. No one in the small hick town would ever wear a suit as nice as what he wore.

Of course when you picture a vampire you picture of black tuxedo, white-collared shirt, and nice black freshly polished shoes. You would also expect them to wear a cape. That part was right. He did indeed have a cape. But it didn’t have a collar. Not those high pointed collars that little kids wear on Halloween night. 

Yes indeed, Kraft wore a suit. It was black, but it wasn’t a tuxedo, more of a mix between formal and casual. It was formal because it was neat. But it is also something you would see a regular man walking down the street wearing even though he wasn’t working. There was no tie in the collar on his white shirt. Apparently he didn’t want something stopping his victim’s blood flow through his throat. But also would allow his throat to expand fully when sucking the blood of the victims. 

His face was a caricature of a monster. That’s why Dillon and Jim both knew he was a creature instead of human. His cheekbones are highly defined and the sockets around his eyes are deep. His ears were pointed like a regular Dracula action figure, but only slightly. 

His cape wasn’t a nice silk soft. It was more ragged. It had tears in it. but they were sewn helter skelter. Another way you could tell he was a creature was that his nails were filed to points.  It would seem if you thought he was human that he shaved and filed his nails to points. But his nails grew naturally like that. The normal roundness of the pink nail body before it hits the white edge was just pointed, giving the entire nail tip an arrowhead look. 

He could decide to look like a normal man if he wanted to. Walking straight upright like everybody else. He mostly does that all the time. But the way he acts when nobody is watching is different from what his victims see. Underneath that suit he is thin and bony. Deep in the woods behind the high school is where he stayed, which is ironic because the woods leading up the hill behind the school led to the apartment complex in which Dillon Crawford lived. Somewhere between Dillon’s house and the high school was a cave embedded in the side of the hill.  In that hillside, deep in the cave, Kraft would take off his suit and the Beast Within would show. He would walk on all fours. He looked like a gorilla who went on a diet. And that diet was called starvation. His eyes glowed bright yellow. The color of yellow a kid would color in a bolt of lightning. And in that cave he kept some of his victims’ bodies, to keep them until later feeding in case he didn’t leave the cave. 

When looking in his mouth you’ll see that his two front teeth are normal but the next two out from that are slightly pointed. The next two out from that are his longer fangs. The sharp protrusions in which he punctures the skin and sucks every ounce of blood from his victims bodies.  But there are also special cases.

 As in the case of Jim, he was set to live on the streets for the rest of his life until the cancer took him. But Kraft saw an opportunity. Throughout his millions of years of living he had followers. In every town he took over, he had followers, or servants, as you’ve read. He targeted the people less noticed by society because if they were to go missing, nobody would bat an eye. He has done this for centuries. And he had slowly taken over little towns such as Ridgeview. And that is exactly what he planned to do. He would take a servant and that servant would create another, and so on, and so forth. 

Soon the towns would drop off the map and would be labeled as ghost towns and the surrounding areas. To the travelers, the town would be empty. The town would look almost apocalyptic. It didn’t look apocalyptic because of the fact it was empty. but it looked apocalyptic because in the last minutes of people’s lives they fought the creatures that attacked them.  There were crashed cars, shattered windows, buildings reduced to rubble, and some of the buildings completely burned to the ground.  But what most people don’t notice is the town wasn’t abandoned.

It was more lively than ever. It’s just its inhabitants were nocturnal.  The places look more lively at night than they do during the day. These travelers would just have to search around to see that. Look in the trunks of cars to find these creatures sleeping. Look in the basements or the crawl spaces underneath the houses to see them nestled up together. And where the vampires could find that would work as their shelter, they would sleep in. But there were some houses in this town that didn’t have these vicious beasts within their walls. These houses would be occupied by people who’d be able to protect themselves. In one place that would keep the survivors safe was the church.  The church was boarded shut. it seemed that the people who stayed there didn’t have faith in the church, so they had to board up the windows and doors.

But in the case of Jim Johnson, Kraft was wrong on that account of nobody noticing his disappearance. There was one person who would notice the disappearance of James “Jim” Johnson. That one person was John Thorn, investigator for the Ridgeview City Police Department.